Largely designed by Pierre Daunou and Boissy d'Anglas, it established a bicameral legislature, intended to slow down the legislative process, ending the wild swings of policy under the previous unicameral systems.

On 21 September 1794, the remains of Jean-Paul Marat, whose furious articles had promoted the Reign of Terror, were placed with great ceremony in the Panthéon, while on the same day, the moderate Convention member Merlin de Thionville described the Jacobins as "A hangout of outlaws" and the "knights of the guillotine".

Following the model of Danton's seizure of the National Assembly in June 1792, a mob of sans-culottes invaded the meeting hall of the Convention at the Tuileries Palace, killed one deputy, and demanded that a new government be formed.

To assure the supply of food to the sans-culottes in Paris, the base of support of the Jacobins, the Convention had strictly regulated grain distribution and set maximum prices for bread and other essential products.

He formed an alliance of utopian socialists and radical Jacobins, including Félix Lepeletier, Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, Sylvain Marechal, Jean-Pierre-André Amar and Jean-Baptiste Robert Lindet.

The military objective set by the Convention in October 1795 was to enlarge France to what were declared its natural limits: the Pyrenees, the Rhine and the Alps, the borders of Gaul at the time of the Roman Empire.

In 1795, Prussia, Spain and the Dutch Republic quit the War of the First Coalition and made peace with France, but Great Britain refused to accept the French annexation of the Austrian Netherlands.

He forced Austria to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797), whereby Emperor Francis II ceded Lombardy and the Austrian Netherlands to the French Republic in exchange for Venice and urged the Imperial Diet to surrender the lands beyond the Rhine.

General Pierre Augereau, a close subordinate and ally of Bonaparte, and his troops arrived in Paris on 7 August, though it was a violation of the Constitution for soldiers to be within twelve leagues of the city without permission of the Councils.

François de Neufchåteau was chosen by a drawing of lots to leave the Directory and Barras proposed only moderate Jacobins to replace him: the choice fell on Jean-Baptiste Treilhard, a lawyer.

General Louis-Alexandre Berthier, who had replaced Bonaparte as the commander of the Army of Italy, imitated the actions of the Directory in Paris, purging the new republic's legislature of members whom he considered too radical.

In Turin, King Charles-Emmanuel IV, (whose wife, Clotilde, was Louis XVI's youngest sister), fled French dominance and sailed, protected by the British fleet, to Sardinia.

A large team of prominent scientists was added to the expedition; twenty-one mathematicians, three astronomers, four architects, thirteen naturalists and an equal number of geographers, plus painters, a pianist and the poet François-Auguste Parseval-Grandmaison.

The Directory made the error of sending one of the most prominent revolutionaries of 1789, the Abbé Sieyés, who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, as ambassador to Berlin, where his ideas appalled the arch-conservative and ultra-monarchist king.

Peace negotiations with Austria went nowhere in the spring of 1799, and the Directory decided to launch a new offensive into Germany, but the arrival of a Russian army under Alexander Suvorov and fresh Austrian forces under the Archduke Charles for a time changed the balance of power.

The British admiral and naval commander in the eastern Mediterranean, Sir Sidney Smith, who had lived in Paris and knew France well, gave the officer a packet of recent French newspapers and sent him back to Bonaparte.

They declared the election of the Director Treilhard illegal on technical grounds and voted to replace him with Louis-Jérôme Gohier, a lawyer who had been Minister of Justice during the Convention, and who had overseen the arrest of the moderate Girondin deputies.

[72] On 27 June General Jourdan, a prominent Jacobin member of the Councils, proposed a mass draft of all eligible young men between twenty and twenty-five to raise two hundred thousand new soldiers for the army.

[79] Early in the morning of 9 November, army units began taking positions in Paris, and the members of the Council of Ancients were awakened and instructed to come to the Tuileries Palace for an emergency meeting.

[80] Bonaparte wrote his own official version of what happened, which was published in all newspapers and posted on placards on walls all over France; it vividly described how he had narrowly escaped death from the hands of "twenty Jacobin assassins" and concluded: "The majority returned freely and peacefully to the meeting hall, listened to the propositions which had been made for assuring the public safety, deliberated and prepared a beneficial resolution which should become the new law and basis of the Republic.

[85] The working class and poor in Paris and other large cities suffered particularly from the high inflation during the first part of the Directory, which brought higher prices for bread, meat, wine, firewood and other basic commodities.

In one case, the Chevalier enterprise received a contract to build three large warships and two frigates at Rochefort; the company was paid in national property seized from the aristocracy and the Church, but it never constructed the ships, or even bought the materials.

A businessman named Liardot rented a large former mansion, brought in selected eligible young women as paying guests, and invited men seeking wives to meet them at balls, concerts and card games each given at the house each evening.

Some of the former palatial townhouses of the nobility were rented and used for ballrooms; the Hôtel de Longueville near the Louvre put on enormous spectacles, with three hundred couples dancing, in thirty circles of sixteen dancers each, the women in nearly transparent dresses, styled after Roman tunics.

Beside the Méot and Beauvilliers, under the arcades of the Palais-Royal were the restaurants and cafés such as Naudet, Robert, Véry, Foy, Huré , Berceau, Lyrique, Liberté conquise, de Chartres (now Le Grand Véfour), and du Sauvage (the last owned by the former coachman of Robespierre).

Members of the sect included some prominent figures, such as General Hoche, the industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, the painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and the American philosopher and political activist Thomas Paine.

The conquest of Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy improved the situation somewhat: French goods could be transported on the neutral ships of these countries, and maritime traffic on the Baltic Sea to Germany became an important trade route for France.

The Revolution intervened, and on 27 July 1793 the Convention decreed the creation of a Museum of the Republic (Musée de la République française), which opened on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries.

Despite all of his faults, he was treated differently than the others, first of all because, unlike the other four, he was not a lawyer; and despite his laziness, his debauched habits, his bad manners, and his liaisons with the Jacobins, he alone was credited with 18 Fructidor [the downfall of Robespierre], and he gave the appearance of a man of action, more capable of governing than his colleagues...

[112] The most celebrated and vivid description of French society under the Directory was written by the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, published in 1864, which described the mores, daily life, culture and preoccupations of the Parisians.